I have lots of old photos from my family. Most are over 70 years old. Trying to understand how to improve them. My question concerns the aging process. I have lots of photos that appear light and/or brownish in color. I do not know if they were originally black and white and just faded into a tannish brown or whether that was a way of processing photos 70 years ago or so.

Sepia prints were very stylish back then, so normally they probably were brown to begin with, if that's your question. However, the yellowing of the paper makes me wonder a bit about the image you posted.

I also have been scanning many very old photos and have another twist to the topic. I have found that most old portraits, that were done in a studio, were originally sepia toned when my family member got them. This has been the case since at least the early 1900's. In fact, even my old high school photo back in the 60's, was done that way. I scan everything in color, and then make adjustments to retain that slight sepia tone. I think converting them to grayscale isn't appropriate in those cases. However, in Tim's example, it clearly was a regular b/w snapshot and once all the levels, contrast, fixing, etc are done, I think it's OK to convert to grayscale.

It's a lot easier to take a scanned old photo and first use Enhance...Convert to Black and White to get rid of all the colour information. Your retouching (fixing tears, and faded portions of the image) will be a lot easier. When you're finished, it's a very simple matter to add a sepia tone if you wish.